Psilocybin with psychological support improves emotional face recognition in treatment-resistant depression.

RationaleDepressed patients robustly exhibit affective biases in emotional processing which are altered by SSRIs and predict clinical outcome.ObjectivesThe objective of this study is to investigate whether psilocybin, recently shown to rapidly improve mood in treatment-resistant depression (TRD), alters patients' emotional processing biases.MethodsSeventeen patients with treatment-resistant depression completed a dynamic emotional face recognition task at baseline and 1 month later after two doses of psilocybin with psychological support. Sixteen controls completed the emotional recognition task over the same time frame but did not receive psilocybin.ResultsWe found evidence for a group × time interaction on speed of emotion recognition (p =.035). At baseline, patients were slower at recognising facial emotions compared with controls (p